In a distributed printing system known in the art, a single print job that requires the printing of a plurality of pages or a plurality of copies is printed by being assigned to a plurality of printers or to a plurality of devices such as copiers having a printer function (these devices shall be referred to as “printers” below) connected to a network. Using such a distributed printing system makes it possible to print a plurality of pages at high speed.
In a conventional distributed printing system, however, it is difficult for the user to ascertain which printer will print out information and how the information will be printed out. As a consequence, when all pages cannot be printed owing to a problem such as depletion of paper in a printer for distributed printing, the pages of the printed matter become mixed and out of sequence if reprinting is carried out by changing the destination of print data from the faulty printer to a normal printer automatically. As a result, collecting the printouts and putting them in the proper order becomes a difficult task.